Читать книгу Bots - Nick Monaco - Страница 22

Automated agents are often used to carry out the same tasks humans do, but much, much faster and more consistently than humans ever could. This ability can be used in the commercial realm to simplify workflows and facilitate information dissemination. For example, newsrooms frequently automate the publishing, posting, and dissemination of new articles on social media sites using news bots (Lewis, Guzman, et al., 2019; Lokot & Diakopoulos, 2016; Thurman et al., 2019). In some cases, news bots are used to write stories, especially formulaic reports that rely on routine data; in 2016, The Washington Post’s Heliograf bot composed brief stories on hundreds of election race results (Peiser, 2019; WashPostPR, 2018).

Bots’ efficiency and consistency can also be useful for taking care of non-commercial routine tasks. For example, the DoNotPay bot is a service bot that helps users cut red tape, automating the process of contesting parking tickets online in cities around the world (Mannes, 2019). The bot saves users time by automating the rote legal process, making it quicker and easier to contest tickets; it has saved users millions of dollars in fines since it launched (Johnson, 2016).